The Alienist (45 page)

Sara didn’t crow excessively about the extent to which she’d been able to predict the character of that mother, though God knows she would’ve been justified in doing so. Her interviews in New Paltz had supplied her with only a general description of Mrs. Dury, but she’d read enough into those generalities to be very encouraged. Japheth’s mother was well remembered in the town, partly for her zealous advocacy of her husband’s missionary work, but even more vividly for her harsh, cold manner. Indeed, it was widely held among New Paltz’s other matrons that Japheth Dury’s facial spasms had been the result of his mother’s relentless badgering (thus demonstrating that folk wisdom can sometimes attain the status of psychological insight). Encouraging as all this was, it gave Sara only a fraction of the satisfaction offered by Adam Dury’s account. Almost every one of Sara’s hypotheses—from our killer’s mother having been an unwilling bride, to her dislike of childbearing, to her scatological harassment of her son from an early age—had been borne out by what Laszlo and I had heard in Dury’s barn; Adam had even told us that his mother often told Japheth he was a dirty red Indian. A woman had indeed played a “sinister role” in our killer’s life; and while the reverend’s may have been the hand that actually administered beatings in the Dury household, Mrs. Dury’s behavior appeared to have represented another sort of punishment to both her sons, one that was just as powerful. Indeed, Sara and I felt confident in saying that if one of Japheth’s parents had been the “primary” or “intended” victim of his murderous rage, it was almost certainly his mother.

In sum, it now seemed certain that we were dealing with a man whose fantastic bitterness toward the most influential woman in his life had led him to shun the company of women generally. This left us with the question of why he should have chosen to kill boys who dressed up and behaved like females, rather than
de facto
women. In coming up with an answer to this riddle, Sara and I were led back to our earlier theory that the victims all possessed character traits not unlike the killer’s own. The hateful relationship between Japheth Dury and his mother must, we reasoned, have spilled over into self-hatred, as well—for how could any boy despised by his mother fail to question his own worth? Thus Japheth’s anger had crossed sexual lines, becoming a sort of hybrid, or mongrel; and it had found its only release in destroying boys who embodied, in their behavior, similar ambiguity.

The final step in Sara’s and my process of assembling our recently collected clues was the fleshing out of our killer’s transformation from Japheth Dury into John Beecham. Sara had learned little about George Beecham in New Paltz—he’d lived in the town for just a year, and only appeared in local records because he’d voted in the 1874 congressional election—but we were fairly sure that we understood the selection of the name, nonetheless. Since the beginning of our investigation, it had been clear to all of us that we were dealing with a sadistic personality, one whose every action betrayed an obsessive desire to change his role in life from that of the victim to that of the tormentor. It was perversely logical that, as a way of initiating and symbolizing this transformation, he should alter his name to that of a man who had once betrayed and violated him; and it was just as logical that he should keep that name when he began to murder children who apparently trusted him in just the way that he had once trusted George Beecham. There was a clear sense that, careful as the killer doubtless was to cultivate that trust, he despised his victims for being foolish enough to give it. Again, he hoped to eradicate an intolerable element of his own personality by eradicating mirror reflections of the child he’d once been.

And so Japheth Dury had become John Beecham, who, according to the assessments of his doctors at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, was highly sensitive to scrutiny of any kind, and also harbored at least strong feelings (if not outright delusions) of persecution. It was unlikely that these traits of personality had been much ameliorated after his release from St. Elizabeth’s in the late summer of 1886, since that release had been secured through the exploitation of a legal technicality and against the doctors’ wishes; and if indeed John Beecham was our killer, then, in fact, his suspicion, hostility, and violence had only worsened over the years. Sara and I determined that in order for Beecham to have gained the thorough familiarity with New York that he evidently had, he must have come to the city very soon after his release from St. Elizabeth’s, and stayed in it ever since. There was cause for hope in this supposition, because he’d probably had contact with a good many people over the course of ten years, and become, in some neighborhood or walk of life, a familiar character. Of course, we didn’t know precisely what he looked like; but, starting with the physical characteristics that we’d theorized early on, and then refining them by using Adam Dury as a physical model, we believed we could concoct a description that, in conjunction with the name John Beecham, would make identification a fairly easy matter. Of course, there was no guarantee that he was still using the name John Beecham; but both Sara and I believed that, given what the name meant to him, he had continued and would continue to do so, until forced to stop.

That was about all the hypothesizing we could do, pending the Isaacsons’ return. Wednesday evening arrived, however, without our having had any word from the detective sergeants, and so Sara and I decided to attend to another unpleasant task: that of convincing Theodore to allow us to go on with the investigation in spite of Kreizler’s departure. We both suspected that this wasn’t going to be easy. It had only been Roosevelt’s great respect for Kreizler that had allowed him to consider the idea in the first place (that, and his propensity for unorthodox solutions). Having spent the beginning of the week searching for Connor, as well as attending to the ongoing battle between the forces of reform and corruption at Police Headquarters, Roosevelt remained unapprised of developments within our investigation as of Wednesday evening; but, knowing that he would learn the truth from either Kreizler or the Isaacsons eventually, Sara and I decided to take the bear by the ears and tell him ourselves.

Anxious to avoid stirring up a potentially dangerous new round of speculation among the journalists and detectives at headquarters, we elected to visit Theodore at his home. He and his wife, Edith, had recently rented a town house at 689 Madison Avenue that belonged to Theodore’s sister, Bamie, a comfortable, well-furnished home that was nonetheless inadequate to the task of containing the antics of the five Roosevelt children. (It must be remembered, in fairness, that the White House itself would soon prove similarly inadequate.) Knowing that Theodore generally made sure to be home for dinner with his brood, Sara and I took a hansom up Madison Avenue to Sixty-third Street at about six o’clock, mounting the steps of Number 689 at sunset.

Before I’d even rapped on the door the sounds of youthful mayhem became audible from within. The front portal was eventually opened by Theodore’s second son, Kermit, who at the time was six years old. He wore the traditional white shirt, knickers, and longish hair of a boy of his age during that era; but in his right fist he rather ominously held what I supposed to be the horn of an African rhinoceros, mounted on a heavy stand. His face was all defiance.

“Hello, Kermit,” I said with a grin. “Is your father at home?”

“No one shall pass!”
the boy shouted grimly, staring me in the eye.

I lost my grin. “I beg your pardon?”

“No one shall pass!” he repeated. “I, Horatio, will guard this bridge!”

Sara let out a small laugh and I nodded in acknowledgment. “Ah. Yes, Horatio at the bridge. Well, Horatio, if it’s all the same to you…”

I took a step or two into the house, to which Kermit raised the rhino horn and banged it down with surprising force on the toes of my right foot. I let out a sharp cry of pain, prompting Sara to laugh harder, as Kermit again declared,
“No one shall pass!”

Just then Edith Roosevelt’s pleasant but firm voice echoed in from somewhere to the rear of the house: “Kermit! What’s going on out there?”

Kermit’s eyes suddenly went round with apprehension, and then he spun and made for the nearby staircase, hollering “Retreat! Retreat!” as he went. With the pain in my toes beginning to subside I marked the approach of a rather serious-looking young girl of four or so: Theodore’s younger daughter, Ethel. She was carrying a large picture book full of vivid zoological illustrations and walking with evident purpose; but when she caught sight first of Sara and me and then of Kermit vanishing up the stairs, she paused, flicking a thumb in her brother’s direction.

“Horatio at the bridge,” she droned, rolling her eyes and shaking her head. Then she put her face back in the book and continued her progress down the hall.

Suddenly a doorway to our right burst open, producing a rotund, uniformed, and clearly terrified maid. (There were very few servants in the Roosevelt household: Theodore’s father, a prodigious philanthropist, had given away much of the family fortune, and Theodore supported his family primarily through his writing and his meager salary.) The maid seemed oblivious of Sara’s and my presence as she dashed over to take refuge behind the open front door.

“No!” she screamed, to no one that I could see. “No, Master Ted, I will not do it!”

The hall doorway through which the maid had appeared thereupon disgorged an eight-year-old boy who wore a solemn gray suit and spectacles much like Theodore’s. This was Ted, the oldest son, whose status as scion of the family was amply demonstrated not only by his appearance, but by a rather intimidating young barred owl that sat perched on his shoulder, as well as by a dead rat that he held by its tail in one gloved hand.

“Patsy, you really are being ridiculous,” Ted said to the maid. “If we don’t teach him what his natural prey is, we’ll never be able to send him back into the wild. Just hold the rat above his beak—” Ted stopped as he finally became aware that there were two callers standing in the doorway. “Oh,” he said, his eyes brightening behind the spectacles. “Good evening, Mr. Moore.”

“Evening, Ted,” I answered, shying away from the owl.

The boy turned to Sara. “And you’re Miss Howard, aren’t you? I met you at my father’s office.”

“Well done, Master Roosevelt,” Sara said. “It seems you have a good memory for detail—a scientist needs one.”

Ted smiled very self-consciously at that, then remembered the rat in his hand. “Mr. Moore,” he said quickly, with renewed enthusiasm. “Do you think you could take this rat—here, by the tail—and hold it about an inch above Pompey’s beak? He’s not used to the sight of prey, and it sometimes scares him—he’s been living on strips of raw beefsteak. I’ve got to have a free hand to make sure he doesn’t fly off.”

One less accustomed to life in the Roosevelt household might’ve balked at this request; I, however, having been present for many such scenes, simply sighed, took the rat by the tail, and positioned it as Ted had requested. The owl spun his head around once or twice rather bizarrely, then lifted his large wings and flapped them in apparent confusion. Ted, however, had a good hold of the talons with his gloved hand, and proceeded to make some hooting, squealing sounds that seemed to calm the bird. Eventually Pompey turned his remarkably flexible neck so that his beak was pointing directly at the ceiling, grabbed the rat by the head, and proceeded to swallow the thing, tail and all, in a half-dozen gruesome gulps.

Ted grinned wide. “Good boy, Pompey! That’s better than boring old steak, isn’t it? Now all you’ve got to do is learn to catch them for yourself, and then you can go off and be with your friends!” Ted turned to me. “We found him in a hollow tree in Central Park—his mother’d been shot, and the other hatchlings were already dead. He’s come along fine, though.”

“Look out, below!”
came a sudden cry from the top of the stairs, at which Ted’s face grew very anxious and he hustled back out of the hall with his owl. The maid tried to follow him, but became transfixed by the sight of a large white mass that was bulleting down from the second floor atop the staircase bannister. Unable to decide which way to run, the maid finally crumpled to the floor and covered her head with a shriek, narrowly avoiding what might have been a very grim collision with Miss Alice Roosevelt, twelve years old. Slamming from the bannister to a carpet on the floor with well-practiced skill and a howling laugh, Alice proceeded to jump up, straighten her rather busy white dress, and hold a taunting finger out to the maid.

“Patsy, you great goose!” she laughed. “I’ve told you, never stay still, you’ve
got
to pick a direction and run!” Turning the delicate, pretty face that would, in several years, cut a swath through Washington’s most eligible bachelors like a scythe through so much wheat, Alice faced Sara and me, smiling and curtsying ever so slightly. “Hello, Mr. Moore,” she said, with the confidence of a girl who knows, even at twelve, the power of her own charms. “And is this
really
Miss Howard?” she went on, more excitedly and ingenuously. “One of the women who works at headquarters?”

“It is, indeed,” I replied. “Sara, meet Alice Lee Roosevelt.”

“How do you do, Alice?” Sara said, extending a hand.

Alice was all mature confidentiality as she took Sara’s hand and replied, “I know that a lot of people think it’s scandalous that women are working at headquarters, Miss Howard, but
I
think it’s
bully
!” She held up a small satchel, the drawstring of which was wrapped around her wrist. “Would you like to see my snake?” she asked, and before the somewhat startled Sara could answer Alice had produced a wriggling, two-foot garter snake.

“Alice!” It was Edith’s voice again, and this time I turned to see her lithely moving down the hallway toward us. “Alice,” she repeated, in the careful but authoritative voice she used with this, the only child in the house that was not her own. “I
do
think, dear, that we might let newcomers in the house get their things off and sit down before we introduce them to the reptiles. Hello, Miss Howard. John.” Edith touched Alice’s forehead gently. “
You’re
the one I depend on for civilized behavior, you know.”